Using a Cloche for Early Spring Gardening

Cloche: A cloche (pronounced "klosh") is a lightweight covering for a plant or plants that can easily be moved. A cloche is the simplest cover to build and use. It can easily be moved to different parts of the garden to cover different plants. When the cloche is put on over tender young plants in early spring, it's called a "hot cap." Unlike cold frames, cloches allow light to reach a plant from every direction. 

You can reuse cloches to cover as many as 3, 4, or more crops in the same year. Cloches are especially well suited for use in the maritime Northwest, where plants need protection from excessive rain and cold winds more than from very low temperatures. The weaknesses of cloches are their vulnerability to heavy wind and their inability to keep plants as warm as cold frames or greenhouses.

Cloche Materials. A cloche can be made of anything that transmits light, so the possibilities for design are nearly limitless. They can be made of cheap materials - cheaper than those needed to make a cold frame or greenhouse. 

To cover a row of plants or a section of garden, you can build one large cloche or a series of modular cloches that link together. The word "cloche" is French for bell. In Europe, gardeners have covered plots for centuries, and in the 1600s, French market gardeners used a glass jar in the shape of a bell to cover a plant. Now cloches for individual plants may be made of waxed paper, plastic, fiberglass, or glass. Or your cloche may be a big, plastic-covered tunnel or tent that covers entire rows of plants. A wide variety of cloches are available commercially, with an equally wide range in prices. When open-air gardening begins in the summer, wash your cover material, dry, and store in a shady place until needed in the fall.

Homemade Cloche Design. You can scrape together a cloche by making half-circle hoop rows out of old coat hangers and then covering them with plastic. Or cut out the top, bottom, or side of any 1-gal. plastic or glass jug. To cover a wide raised bed, use sections of hog-wire fencing curved to fit the beds and covered with plastic.

• Tunnel: In general, the tunnel style is made by stretching 4-mil polyethylene plastic sheeting over a line of half-circle hoops. The hoops are bent and fastened to strips at the top and bottom sides so they will stay put. For example, you could put the plastic over 6 x 6-inch mesh concrete-reinforcing wire. The reinforcing-wire cloche looks like the tunnel style except the wire is arched from where it is nailed to a 10-foot lumber plank over to the other side, where it is nailed to a parallel plank. Then the plastic is put over that. The 2 end openings are covered with more plastic.To ventilate a tunnel cloche, on cloudy days you open the end away from the wind. On sunny days you can open both ends. A breeze is created by the warm air leaving the cloche. As the weather gets warmer, you'll be able to leave one end open continuously. When the weather gets hot, of course, you take off the plastic and put it away until fall, when the weather gets cold again.

• Tent: This cloche is lighter, portable, and easier to build than the tunnel. It has 4- or 6-mil polyethylene plastic sheeting stretched over an umbrella-tent-style support.

Using a Cloche. Cloches can be placed over any area of your garden, large or small, that you want to protect. To water, weed, and harvest, you lift the cloche off the bed, tilt up one end, or take off the plastic. If your cloche has no natural opening, you must remember to ventilate by propping up one side.

Creative Solutions for Keeping Pests Out of Your Garden

If you grow it, they will come.  Critters don't understand property rights. Gardens are often and disastrously lost to predators unless the owner takes garden defense seriously. Identify the predator, or potential predator (the one that gets into the neighbor's garden). Then act to prevent the problem, or you'll risk losing what you're working so hard to grow. 

One general deterrent for deer, dogs, cats, and raccoons is the "garden cop," a sprinkler that sprays 3- to 4-second bursts of water when its electronic sensor detects an animal (or person). After squirting, it automatically shuts off and continues to scan the area for the next perimeter violation. "Garden cops" connect to your garden hose and are available from garden suppliers.

Birds, wild or tame, love to eat corn, bean, and pea seeds right after they sprout and before these plants are up a few inches. If birds are a risk, plant the seed extra deep and don't leave any showing. Firm the planted kernels so they stay down there until they germinate. A well-made scarecrow that moves in a breeze may keep them away, especially if it wears real people clothes, has shiny foil hanging strips for "hands," and has a foil face.

Gophers make a horseshoe-shaped mound with an exit hole on one side. A wide variety of traps, poison gases, and poison baits are available from garden supply companies to deal with gophers or moles. Or you could try chewing gum. Dig down to a part of the hole under the mound. Unwrap the gum (don't touch it and leave your scent), and puts 2 sticks down in the hole. Use large leaves (or paper) to cover the hole where he dug down, and puts dirt on top of that. (Block the light, but don't cover the gum with dirt.) Only one kind of gum works for this. It's "juicy" and "fruity."

Slugs and snails will eat stalks and leaves of tender plants. A thick growth of prostrate rosemary makes a border they will not cross, seeming to dislike its sharp foliage. To collect them, put out a saucer of beer, or of milk mixed with water, set down into the ground so that the dish's edge is at ground level. They'll crawl in and drown. Or save eggshells, dry, and finely crush. Then sprinkle them on the garden ground where the slimers go. The shell fragments stick to them and kill them. Don't use the salting method of slug murder because salt kills both slugs and garden veggies.

 

Planting and Growing Quinoa

Quinoa is a small, hearty and delicious grain similar to millet. Though native to the Andes Mountains, its resilient nature allows it to grow in certain parts of the U.S. as well. Here are few tips from Carla Emery on growing, harvesting, and cooking quinoa. 

Climate: Colorado and New Mexico are good places to grow quinoa. It thrives in the 6,000-7,000-foot zone in the central Rocky Mountain area, in northern California and northward near the Pacific Ocean, and in the interior Northwest as well. Extremely hot weather actually holds back the seed setting process of this crop. According to Steve Solomon, "Its seeds sprout in chilly soil, and its frost-hardy seedlings may tolerate night temperatures in the low 20s."

Planting: Sow in spring in fertile soil as soon as the soil is warm (April or May). Steve Solomon again: "Quinoa must be sown early while there remains adequate soil moisture... early sowing - leading to the earliest possible harvest when weather is most likely to be dry - is essential... One organic farmer in the dry highlands of eastern Washington's Cascade foothills grows quinoa like wheat, because when crowded and under competition, the plants don't branch, but instead concentrate the harvest into a single seed head that can be harvested with a combine like wheat. I think the gardener will do better planting in rows about four feet apart, the seed sprinkled thinly in the row and gradually thinned to about eight inches in the row... Far less than an ounce of seed will sow 100 row feet, yielding 25 to 50 pounds of seed." 

Keep the seedbed damp until it has germinated. You can eat the young greens you get from thinning the plants; they're nutritious and tasty. Quinoa will grow about 4 feet high. Steve Solomon wrote, "Keep quinoa well-weeded to allocate all soil moisture to the crop. With only a little fertilizer, quinoa grows fast to a magnificent six or seven feet tall, with numerous bushy side shoots."

Harvesting and Using Quinoa

Harvesting: About mid-summer, it grows a sizable seed head heavy with tiny seeds. Harvest when dead ripe. You can thresh out the grain directly from the field, but threshing will be easier if you harvest and then dry the plants indoors a while more before the flailing. Steve Solomon: "The main hazard is rain. Should the drying seed be moistened, it will sprout right in the head; so if rain threatens once the seed is drying, the plants should be cut, bundled, and hung to finish under cover...When the heads are dry, thresh the seed by walking on the stalks, spread on a tarp. Clean by pouring the seed back and forth between two buckets in a mild breeze."

Of Quinoa and Saponin: Steve Solomon: "The seed coat contains a bitter, somewhat poisonous soap or saponin that prevents insect damage and bird predation, but also must be removed before we can eat the grain.  Fortunately, the saponin can, with patience, be soaked out at home; commercially grown quinoa, which is beginning to appear in health-food stores, conveniently has the saponins and seed coat mechanically removed." Wash only as much quinoa as you're going to cook and eat very soon. The saponin coating needs to be on if the grain is to be stored.

• Steve Solomon's Saponin Soak-Out. "Soak a pint of dry seed overnight in a half-gallon mason jar with a screen lid such as is used to sprout alfalfa, then drain and refill. Continue soaking the seed and rinsing with cold water two to four times a day. Some varieties have harder seed coats containing more saponin than others, and the hardness of your water will regulate the effectiveness of soaking. The foaming saponins may be removed in 36 hours at best; when the water stops foaming when rinsed, the seed is ready for cooking. If 72 hours of rinsing and soaking pass with no end to the foaming, bring the seed to a boil for only a moment, pour off the hot soapy water, cover again, boil rapidly again for only a moment, and pour off the water a second time. Now the seed is ready to cook."

• Other Saponin Wash-Out Systems. Blend about 1⁄2 cup of quinoa with cold water at lowest speed. Keep pouring off the foaming water and adding fresh water. Repeat until the blending doesn't release any more foam. Another system is to make yourself a quinoa-washing bag out of a loose-weave cloth like muslin. Then put in the grain, tie the bag shut, and wash in a series of cold-water baths until there's no more foam released. 

Cooking Quinoa: Steve Solomon: "Add enough water to just about cover the soaked grain; simmer for 20 minutes or so. The cereal is good any time of day. Nutritionally it is oil-rich, and leaves you feeling satisfyingly full for a long time, much like oats." Quinoa grain has a delicate flavor and twice the protein of rice. Substitute in any rice recipes. Quinoa will expand to four times the original bulk in the cooking, so 1 cup of the uncooked grain will give you 4 cups to serve.